Custom Survey Design Options

We ask a number of questions at the end of the standard Employee Engagement & Satisfaction Survey to identify each respondent’s unique demographics. Reviewing your employees’ feedback by demographic areas is key to identifying areas of strength and developing action plans for improvement in the workplace.

Option 1: Customize Job Role and Department Response Options

Organizations customize to obtain more value from their employee survey feedback. If the generic Job Role and Department selections on the standard employee survey don't align with your unique organizational structure, presenting custom response options will ensure that your feedback report segregates the survey response data into meaningful and actionable demographic breakouts.

Employees will be more likely to select an accurate response. Presenting Job Role and Department response options that are familiar to your employees will help them to choose the correct response. They’ll also be less likely to default to the miscellaneous category of “Other” because they’re unable to recognize their specific category. As a result, the response data reported in the Job Role and Department demographic categories will be more credible.

Maximize the quality and quantity of response data you receive. To maintain respondent confidentiality, we do not report any response data for fewer than five individuals in a demographic category. Grouping smaller demographics together increases the probability of having enough respondents in each category to be able to review their feedback.

Capture the specific employee demographics that you want to measure. For example, smaller organizations often customize their survey to eliminate the Job Role and Department questions altogether and instead offer a single question to break out the data into “Exempt” and “Non-Exempt” or “Manager” and “Non-Manager” categories.

Option 2: Add Custom Demographic Questions

You can choose to present additional demographic questions to further categorize your response data, such as:

"What is the highest level of education you have completed?"

“In which location do you work?”

“On which shift do you work?”

Option 3: Pre-assign Demographic Information

Employers using the online survey format may remove the Job Role and Department questions from view on the survey and instead pre-assign the appropriate response options to each employee’s email address. This custom service eliminates the opportunity for employees to inadvertently or intentionally select an inaccurate response.

Option 4: Add Non-Demographic Survey Questions

Is there any other feedback you’d like to gather while you have your employees’ attention? You may add up to five custom survey questions of your choice. The questions can employ variable response option formats such as yes/no, open-ended, or our “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” response scale. The responses to these questions are not used toward consideration for the award.

Option 5: Survey More than a Random Sample of Employees

We encourage organizations with more than 250 employees to include more than just a random sample of team members in the survey process:

Doing so sends a message to employees that you value feedback from everyone;

Surveying greater numbers ensures that the survey invitation is sent to individuals at all levels and in all departments, resulting in more robust feedback reporting;

The 40% minimum survey response rate required to remain in consideration for the award is calculated using the random sample size, and not the total population surveyed, which increases the likelihood of achieving the minimum survey submission rate.

Option 6: Survey "Ineligible" Employees

Employers can gather feedback from staff working in offices outside of the program area, or other associates (such as interns, consultants, seasonal staff, per diem employees, etc.) whose feedback is ineligible to be included in the ranking analysis to determine the award winners.

Have Questions?

We’re here to help! Email your survey specialist, Jamie Linkous, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to review your response data reporting needs and assist you with designing your survey to capture meaningful and actionable results.